#I think I convered all the relevant triggers but please reach out if I’ve missed one

[jewish-sideblog]

During last year’s Chanukkah, I toured Yad Vashem. My tour guide ended with a story that will probably stick with me for the rest of my life.

A Jewish father and his son are held prisoner in Auschwitz— they are lucky, all things considered. Most Jews were gassed upon arrival. The Nazi guards instruct the prisoners that they have to dig mass graves for their fellow Jews every day. The father is appalled by this, of course, but he doesn’t have much choice. A week goes by, and the father and the son are subjected to horrors they could not have imagined before. The first Friday evening in Auschwitz, the father goes to his son and says, “I cannot work on Shabbat. I will not dig graves for Jews on Shabbat. For all my other reservations, I cannot do it, because the Talmud forbids it.” The son is barely fourteen, but he knows that if his father refuses to work, then his father will die. So he goes to meet another prisoner, a former Rabbi. The son pleads with the Rabbi to help his father see sense, and so the Rabbi and the son go together to meet with the father.

“The Talmud forbids us to work on Shabbat,” the Rabbi says, “but pikuach nefesh overrides Talmudic law when a life is in danger. Your life is in danger. Your son’s life is in danger. You are allowed to work on Shabbat.” The father begrudgingly agrees, and he saves his family’s life by digging mass graves on the day of rest.

A few months go by, and the Nazis are running low on food, so they start grinding pig hooves and guts into the slop that gets fed to the prisoners at Auschwitz. The father finds out about this and begins to starve himself. “G-d commands in the Torah us not to eat pork,” he says. The son, out of concern for his father, gets the Rabbi again. “Pikuach nefesh overrides the Torah as well as the Talmud. You must eat, for your life and for your son’s sake. Eat what is given to you. G-d will overlook violating kosher if it means surviving in a place like this.” So the father starts to eat what he is given.

Miraculously, the father and the son survive until winter. There’s never enough food for all the prisoners in Auschwitz to eat, and so there are frequent fights over scraps, but the most valuable thing in the slop is fat. Fat can keep you warmer in the winter, and it can be used to cover up and heal small injuries. If the Nazi guards noticed so much as a scratch on you, they would send you to the gas chambers that same day. Fat was gold in Auschwitz. At some point, the son noticed that the father had been ignoring food and collecting fat. He wasn’t trading it for scraps or favors, he was just keeping it. And he was starving to keep it. So once again, the son and the Rabbi approached the father.

“I’m turning it into a candle,” he said, “for Channukah.” The son and the Rabbi were appalled. The Rabbi said, “Channukah is a cultural holiday. It is not ordained by G-d. Neither the Torah nor the Talmud command you to celebrate it. Why in G-ds name would you sacrifice your food for that?” The father replied,

“You can live three days without water. You can live three weeks without food. But you cannot live three minutes without hope.”

The son and the Rabbi helped the father fashion wicks from rags and clothes, and helped steal small bits metal of metal off corpses and guards to make a spark. They lit Channukah candles in the middle of a Nazi concentration camp. The father and the son survived off of hope for the rest of that year, and they both lived to see the liberation of Auschwitz. The father died soon afterwards, but the son, Hugo Gryn, went on to become a Rabbi himself. In fact, the Rabbi of West London Synangoue, and the leader of the British Reform movement. He was described as the most beloved Rabbi in the country. He never lost sight of hope.